Signal modeling techniques in speech recognition

A tutorial on signal processing in state-of-the-art speech recognition systems is presented, reviewing those techniques most commonly used. The four basic operations of signal modeling, i.e. spectral shaping, spectral analysis, parametric transformation, and statistical modeling, are discussed. Three important trends that have developed in the last five years in speech recognition are examined. First, heterogeneous parameter sets that mix absolute spectral information with dynamic, or time-derivative, spectral information, have become common. Second, similarity transform techniques, often used to normalize and decorrelate parameters in some computationally inexpensive way, have become popular. Third, the signal parameter estimation problem has merged with the speech recognition process so that more sophisticated statistical models of the signal's spectrum can be estimated in a closed-loop manner. The signal processing components of these algorithms are reviewed. >